The Careful Use of Compliments (18 page)

Isabel looked at her keenly. “Do you know him? An artist?”

In the distance, the sound of a wailing ambulance siren seemed to be drawing closer. Peter looked at his watch anxiously; the intermission had five minutes to run.

Isabel had to raise her voice now against the sound of the ambulance. “Do you?” she pressed. “Do you know that name?”

Susie looked at the passersby. The light from the door was behind her, and her shadow fell upon the low wall. Somewhere in her mind there was a memory of Frank Anderson. But she could not say who he was or why she should remember the name. The ambulance went past, dodging a car which had stopped awkwardly in the middle of the junction, its driver paralysed by the emergency of the moment.

“It's not an uncommon name,” said Peter. “There must be lots of Frank Andersons in Scotland.” He looked again at his watch. “But the point is this, Isabel: How do you know?”

She wondered how convincing her explanation would sound; probably not very, she decided. “We've been on Jura,” she said. “You know that these two paintings are of Jura? Well, a man called Frank Anderson stayed in a house there and left behind a painting that he'd done. It was pure McInnes. I saw it, Peter. I'm absolutely certain. It's the same scene as that painting which Walter Buie has.” She shrugged. She had made her case.

Peter was watching her, but she could not tell whether he believed her.

“Right,” he said. “That's evidence of a sort, or at least it's a reason to be suspicious, I suppose.”

A bell rang within, warning of the end of the interval. They turned round and went back into the vestibule.

“I don't like this,” said Susie. “This is a criminal offence you've stumbled upon, Isabel. I'm not sure if you should get involved, you know. These things…”

“What Susie's saying is that it's dangerous,” said Peter. “And I think she's right. So I think you should go and talk to Guy Peploe. Hand the matter over to him. He'll know what to do.”

She did not take much persuading. “All right.”

“And you'll definitely do this?” asked Peter. “I know about your tendency to…”

“Interfere?” asked Isabel, playfully.

“You said it rather than I,” said Peter.

 

LATER THAT NIGHT
, well after the concert, when Isabel lay sleepless, Jamie turned to her. He took her hand, stroking it gently. The room was in darkness apart from a sliver of moonlight that penetrated the chink in the curtains, like a searchlight in the night sky.

“You played so beautifully,” said Isabel. “Particularly in the Maxwell Davies.”

Jamie pressed her hand to his chest. His skin, she thought, was so smooth—like satin.

“Every note was perfect,” she went on. “It was.”

He moved her hand across his chest. She felt the beating of his heart, somewhere below her fingers, and that felt the most intimate of all. She might possess him, but she might not touch his heart.

“You shouldn't say that,” he whispered. “Flatterer.”

“No, I mean it. I don't give compliments I don't mean.” She paused. They were whispering, though for no reason; but in the dark it seemed right to whisper, so as not to disturb the silence.

“When I was a boy I used to think that talking in the dark was what it would be like talking to God,” said Jamie. “Odd. I thought that he could hear us in the dark.”

Isabel was not sure about this. “The difference is that we can hear ourselves,” said Isabel. “That's the difference.” It was that, she thought; that, and something to do with the accentuation of the hearing in the absence of other stimuli for the senses.

He turned and kissed her on the forehead. The back of his hand was upon her cheek.

“Tell me a story of a tattooed man,” he whispered. “You promised that you would.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, you did.”

She shifted slightly, so that his hand fell from the side of her cheek. She thought of a tattooed man, the sort of man one saw in Edwardian photographs, those photographs of side show exhibits of the past, every square inch of the body covered with inked designs, the sacred, the demoniacal, the confessional. What could she say about this tattooed man? That he loved his wife, the tattooed lady, and was proud of his son, the tattooed baby? It sounded like a couple of lines from a poem, but it was not; it was from nowhere. And such a story would be trite, she thought; trite and tragic at the same time.

“Your tattooed man, Jamie,” she began. “Let me see, now. All right, the tattooed man.”

He sounded drowsy. “I'm listening.”

His drowsiness communicated itself to her, as a yawn will pass like an infection, from one to another. She felt a wave of tiredness coming over her. She wanted only to lie there with him, close to him in the darkness, and drift off to sleep. It was hard to speak, she was so tired, and anyway she thought that he was now asleep, with his breathing getting deeper, more regular. She let her eyelids close, so that even the sliver of moonlight was blocked out. Before sleep claimed her she thought: We forget so many stories in our lifetime, some told, some that remained untold; some that we did not really know in the first place.
The tattooed man / Who loved his wife, the tattooed lady / And was proud of his son, the tattooed baby.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

H
E'S WEARING
his Macpherson tartan rompers, I see,” said Grace, bending down to tickle Charlie under the chin. “Have you bought him his first kilt yet?”

Isabel had not, but would do so, she thought, when he was about three.

“To wear a kilt one must first be able to walk,” she said. “And his little legs would get rather cold, I think.”

“What a figure he'll cut,” said Grace, admiringly. “Charlie Dalhousie, apple of every eye at the school dances…” She broke off. Would Charlie be Charlie Dalhousie, taking Isabel's name, or would he…She smiled nervously, in the awkwardness of the moment. There were few things that embarrassed Grace, but illegitimacy was one of them, even if the word had been more or less retired. Nobody spoke of illegitimacy anymore, and there were, fortunately, no legal consequences of any significance. But corners of shame remained in some parts of Scotland, even if so many children now were born out of wedlock. And Grace belonged to a section of society where these things were still felt.

Isabel immediately understood and put Grace at her ease. “Yes, Charlie Dalhousie will be quite the young man about town, won't you, Charlie?”

“Good,” said Grace, and went on to the business of the day. Isabel was taking Charlie out, into town, she said, and she would stay in the house and tackle the upstairs bathroom, which she thought had been allowed to become a mess. There was a line of mould tracking its sinister way along the line of grout at the bottom of the shower—Jamie's fault, Grace suspected—as he showered far too much in her opinion and left the cubicle too damp. Grace did not believe in showers, except for when a bath was for some reason unavailable: then one might have a shower, a quick one, remembering to wipe down the tiles after use to prevent the formation of mould.

“I've bought something for that shower,” said Grace. “It's—”

“I know,” said Isabel quickly. “Mould.”

For a few moments there was silence; Isabel called such interludes
Grace's moment of censure,
and this was one. But the point had been made, and she wheeled Charlie out under a smiling farewell from her housekeeper. As Isabel walked up the road, she thought about mould. Grace had made her feel responsible for it because Jamie used the shower and Grace considered Isabel to be responsible for Jamie. Grace wanted her employer to feel
guilty
about the presence of mould, but she felt that she could not add mould to her burden of guilt. She already felt guilty about the use of her money to buy the
Review,
and she felt guilty about the sheer pleasure she had taken in the thought of Lettuce's face when he read the letter from Simon. She could just see him, opening the letter dismissively—having seen the Edinburgh postmark and assuming that it was some inconsequential communication from herself, but no! There it was, in Lettuce's now trembling hands, a letter from none other than Simon Mackintosh, WS, partner in the large law firm of Turcan Connell. Lettuce would not know what WS stood for, but she would be delighted to tell him, if asked: it was Writer to the Signet, which meant that Simon was a member of that august legal society with its splendid library overlooking St. Giles Cathedral in the very heart of Edinburgh. Let Lettuce contemplate that for a moment in his London fastness. So might the Hanoverian have quaked at the news that Bonnie Prince Charlie had put his generals to flight.

But sweet as such thoughts were, they were not thoughts which a conscientious moral philosopher could entertain. Schadenfreude in any shape or form was, quite simply, wrong. The discomfort of others should never be delighted over, she reminded herself; it was wrong to gloat. But then she saw Lettuce's face again, caught in a moment of shocked disbelief, and she allowed herself to smile at that. Charlie looked up at her from his supine position and smiled too.

Isabel's destination that morning, determined upon after the concert the previous evening at the Queen's Hall, was Dundas Street and Guy Peploe. She had decided that with Charlie present it would be better to meet at Glass and Thompson, the café a few doors up from the gallery. Charlie could be fed there and would like the colours and bustle of a restaurant.

She was there first, sitting on one of the bench seats at the back, watching the two young men making coffee and preparing bread and quiches for the lunchtime rush that would come in a couple of hours. Suddenly Guy was in front of her, looking down at Charlie with amusement.

“Macpherson,” said Isabel. “My maternal grandmother was a Macpherson and we liked that tartan.”

“That purple is very fine,” said Guy. “He's quite the lad.”

He sat down and fixed Isabel with an expectant look.

“Yes,” she said. “McInnes.”

Guy looked apologetic. “It's been sold, I'm afraid,” he said. “A couple of days ago. The buyer I mentioned to you has taken it. It's going abroad. I'm sorry—had I known that you were still interested…”

He hesitated, seeing her dismayed expression. “I'm really very sorry, you know,” he said. “I thought that you had decided against it.”

Isabel was lost in thought. The information that she had to give to Guy would be even less welcome now.

Guy was solicitous. “Isabel? Are you really upset?”

“No,” she began. “Not upset. And I wasn't going to buy it. I came to have a word with you about…well, something that I think I've found out about that painting.”

“I'd be most interested,” said Guy. “As I said to you, I think that it's a very fine McInnes.”

Isabel shook her head. “But it isn't, Guy. It's not a McInnes at all.”

The proprietor of the restaurant had caught sight of Isabel and had come to greet her. She asked him for two coffees and then turned back to Guy. “I believe that that painting was painted by a forger by the name of Frank Anderson. I don't know exactly who he is, or where he is. But that painting was painted by him and not by McInnes. I know that, Guy. How I came to know it is a bit complicated, but I do.”

The coffees arrived. Guy flattened the milky top of his with a teaspoon, staring into his cup as if to find the solution there. Isabel watched him. “You're asking me,” he said at last. “You're asking me to distrust my own judgement on a painting's authenticity. On what grounds? What are these complicated grounds?”

She told him, describing the moment when she stood before the fake McInnes in Barnhill, and of how certain she was that it was by the same hand that did the larger painting he had just sold. “You say that you can tell just by looking,” she ended. “Well so can I. In this case, at least.”

Neither said anything for a full minute. Then Guy sighed. “What do I do now?” He was thinking aloud, rather than asking Isabel. “I suppose I contact the purchaser and tell him that we have some doubts about the painting. And then?” He looked at Isabel, waiting for a suggestion.

“It's not just me,” she said. “If I thought I was the only one with reservations about these paintings, then I would feel a little less convinced. But I think that the person who bought the McInnes at auction thinks the same.”

Guy looked sceptical. “So you're suggesting that that's a fake too?”

“Walter Buie offered to sell it to me more or less immediately after he got hold of it,” said Isabel flatly. “I think he did that because he'd tumbled to the truth and wanted to get rid of it.”

Guy shook his head. “Walter Buie? Nonsense, Isabel. Walter is…well, he's just not that type. He simply wouldn't…”

“Why would he try to sell it, then?”

Guy laughed. “I could tell you of numerous occasions when people have changed their minds—more or less immediately. They take the painting home and discover that it's not right for the room. Somebody makes a remark about it and they decide that it's not to their taste after all. There are a hundred and one reasons why people change their minds.”

She listened to this. Of course people could change their minds, but in this case there were just too many factors suggesting otherwise. And Walter Buie might be a paragon of respectability in the eyes of the public, but such people often had a dark, private side which was very different. There were so many cases of that, and this was, after all, Edinburgh, which had spawned the creator of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“Anyway,” said Guy, “I'll do what's necessary. I suspect you're wrong about all this, but I'll do my best to find out more—if there's any more to find out. I'll tell the purchaser. And I'll make enquiries about this Frank Anderson.”

“The name means nothing to you?” asked Isabel.

Guy looked thoughtful. “It rang a distant bell,” he said. “But I can't bring anything to mind. I'll ask about, though, and I'll let you know.” He paused. “Do you want me to speak to Walter Buie?”

It was tempting. If Guy did that, then there would be no need for her to do anything further; she would have handed the whole matter over. But Isabel was not one to abandon responsibilities quickly, and so her answer was no; she would do that herself. She had become involved in this business, and she would see it through. It was a question of principle. And it was also, she decided, slightly exciting. Not very exciting; just slightly exciting, which, as she started to walk back up Dundas Street, past the elegant gardens that lay along the north side of Queen Street, was just right for Edinburgh. One did not want too much excitement in a place like Edinburgh. One could go to Glasgow for that, or even London, if one had the urge.

 

WHEN SHE RETURNED
to the house, Grace whisked Charlie away. She wanted to take him out into the garden, she said, as the weather, which had been fine, could change at any moment.

“That fox,” said Grace, “has dug up half the small rose bed. You know the one near the garden shed?”

“The summerhouse?”

“Whatever you call it. Yes, there. He's dug a great big hole and put the soil all over the lawn.”

Isabel peered out the window. The grass near the summerhouse certainly looked darker. “He must be thinking of a new burrow,” she said. “Even foxes must have their plans for the future. Presumably they face the same sort of dilemmas that we do: renovate, or dig a new burrow.”

Grace stared at Isabel with a look that was half disbelief, half scorn. “They don't think that way,” she said after a while.

Isabel returned the stare, but did not say anything. The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind—one which enjoyed dry wit and understood the absurd—left one in a shrinking minority. Isabel remembered being at a conference at Christ Church in Oxford and sitting next to a Japanese woman over breakfast in the Great Hall. The Japanese woman, who was accompanying her husband, a philosopher, to the conference—
Kant for Our Times
—had suddenly turned to her and said, “I am so old-fashioned. I am a dodo.”

The heartfelt comment had been triggered by the hall and its table lights, by its paintings of past masters and benefactors of the college, by the presence of what seemed like a quieter past, and Isabel had felt a surge of sympathy for the other woman.

“I am sure that there must be a club for dodos,” she said. “The dodos club. And it would meet in places like this.”

The woman's eyes had widened, and then she had burst out laughing. “The dodos club! That's so clever.”

It was not very clever, thought Isabel, but for a moment there had been a sense of contact across cultures, of kindred spirits reaching out to one another. And that happened from time to time, when she met somebody who could look at the world in the same way and see the joke. But not now, in this conversation with Grace about Brother Fox and the mess that he had made of the small rose bed.

“We'll have to watch that fox when Charlie's around,” said Grace.

Isabel frowned. Was Grace suggesting that Brother Fox would
harm
Charlie in some way? Did foxes do such things?

It was as if Grace had heard the unspoken question. “They carry off lambs,” she said darkly.

The thought that anything should
eat
Charlie appalled Isabel; even the thought that a dangerous world should lie ahead of him, filled with creatures that might wish to harm him, was in itself bad enough, but eat…

“Brother Fox would not harm him,” she said. “Foxes don't bite unless you corner them. And nor for that matter do wolves.” Although at the back of her mind there was a vague memory of reading of a fox that
did
bite a child, in London. But that must have been a very stressed urban fox; Brother Fox was not like that.

If Grace had been prepared to accept this defence of foxes, she was not prepared to do so with wolves. “Wolves do,” she said simply. “Wolves are very dangerous. I have a sister in Canada.”